Living the dream

It’s been a frustrating couple of days, concerning my computer and internet connection, which I kept losing. It’s a long and tedious story, neither interesting nor original, I’m sure, as we all have our frustrations, if not about technology, about something else that doesn’t work properly and requires endless diagnostics and time to straighten away. It’s been going on intermittently for some months, but at this very moment, post today’s visit to the Apple store to confirm that the problem is not my computer, and my most recent call to our internet provider and subsequent adjustments “on the other end,” all the bars in the little fan at the top of the computer are full. So here’s hoping.

There’s also been a comment from my daughter-in-law Dayna’s blog tumbling around in my mind, for which I’m grateful. Continue reading

The brief and somewhat inarticulate version of our tour to Russia

The peal of bells, then a choir of men’s voices… Blessed art Thou, O Christ our God…. Voices that rise and fall with the text, with the melody. Gorgeous harmonies.

Our wonderful local Mennonite men’s choir? Close, if you mean the ache and beauty of the sound, but no, definitely not. It’s the monks of the Holy Trinity-St. Sergius Lavra and the Moscow Theological Schools, singing hymns of the Russian Orthodox Church. I’m listening, as I write, to the CD; we were given it as a bonus when we paid a tiny fee to photograph inside the churches at Sergiev Posad, the place considered the heart of Russian Orthodoxy. Continue reading

Miscellanea: July

What I really appreciate about a blog is the opportunity to play — by which I mean, change things around if one likes, experiment, be of this mind for a while, or that look, and when it seems necessary, refresh it.

So, a year after beginning an author blog in an attempt to separate out my identity as an author from my other ramblings, I’ve decided to bring myself into just one web place again — here.  If you’re interested, I offer an explanation in my last post there, but the short version is, it began to feel too complicated to be divided. (I don’t know what one does with abandoned sites, however; do I let the content there grow old and faded in the passing online weather, or do I remove it from public view?) Continue reading